


Constant

by Minutia_R



Category: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo | Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:00:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"I am ashamed," Fernand whispered.  "Someone cut me loose from the net, and I kicked him down on my way to the surface.  I did not know who it was, or care, so long as I could breathe again.  My uncle went down with his boat and his crew, but I—what sort of man am I?"</i>
</p>
<p>A number of occasions on which Fernand Mondego (later known as the Count of Morcerf) refused to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Constant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [El Staplador (elstaplador)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/gifts).



> A while back, I came off a reread of _The Count of Monte Cristo_ and said to myself, "Self, I wonder if there's any Eugenie/Louise fic on the internet?"
> 
> There was! It was by El Staplador and it was great. I've been a fan ever since, so I was really excited to get this assignment.
> 
> Happy yuletide, El Staplador! This isn't _precisely_ what you requested, but I hope you like it anyway.

_From time to time he sat sad and motionless on the summit of Cape Pharo, at the spot from whence Marseilles and the Catalans are visible, watching for the apparition of a young and handsome man, who was for him also the messenger of vengeance. Fernand's mind was made up; he would shoot Dantès, and then kill himself. But Fernand was mistaken; a man of his disposition never kills himself, for he constantly hopes._

#

In a small, weather-beaten house in the village of the Catalans outside of Marseilles, a woman sat at the window spinning flax. Though her face and hands proclaimed her to be a woman of middle years, there was no grey in her dark hair, or shadow beneath her dark eyes; she must have been handsome in her youth, and was handsome still, as the crags of the Catalans are handsome: stark and unyielding. A visitor entering the house, however, might well have wondered what she hoped to see from the window, when the stormy skies were making midday blacker than night. The visitor—if there had been one—might have advised the woman to turn her eyes to her work instead, and for heaven's sake to light a lamp, so she might not waste her labor in spinning tangled thread. But most likely the visitor would have said nothing; there was something in the woman's face that forbade such liberties; besides which, the thread the woman was spinning, all unseeing, was as straight and fine as God's judgment.

The same could not be said of the thread of the young girl who sat by her side. Though she squinted closely at her spindle as she dropped and raised it, her hands had not her mother's deftness, nor did her spirit have the same icy calm. From time to time her eyes darted from her work, not to the window, but to the door of the little house.

"He will come home!" the girl declared, as her thread snapped once again. "I know it."

Her mother gathered up her own spindle without looking away from the window, and didn't answer. She may have considered the flash of lightning outside, and the roll of thunder that followed it, answer enough. But shortly a wet sucking step was heard in the path outside, and the girl leapt up, heedless of her work that scattered on the floor, and ran to the door.

"Did I not tell you—" she began, throwing the door open, but her face fell as she saw who it was making his way with difficulty towards the house: a boy of ten or twelve years, thin, soaked, and miserable, cradling one hand in his other arm, close to his side. "Fernand! Where is my father?"

"Gone," said Fernand, his teeth chattering and eyes wide with freshly recalled terror. "All gone, except for me."

The girl put her hands to her mouth to stop an escaping sob, and her eyes flashed fire like the heavens. "It cannot be true! Oh, you ought to be ashamed to have lived to come here and tell us this!"

"Mercédès, bring your cousin inside, and warm him a mug of brandy," came her mother's voice from within. "And stop talking nonsense."

Mercédès hurried inside, and Fernand trailed dripping after her; she put the poker into the fire to heat and reached up to the high shelf for the jug of brandy, and he lowered himself heavily onto the low stool she had been sitting on.

"Let me see your hand," said the woman, and Fernand gingerly removed it from the crook of his arm and held it out for her inspection. The web between thumb and forefinger was torn and ragged, and the cut continued across his palm, bleeding only feebly now, though Fernand's shirt was dark with it. "That is wicked work. What did it?"

"A grapnel from the net," Fernand whispered. "I would have been dragged down if not—" Mercédès appeared at his side then, handed him a mug of brandy, which he took awkwardly in his left hand. Her errand done, she threw herself down on the small bed in the corner and gave herself over to weeping. Fernand followed her with troubled eyes. He took a sip from the mug, coughed, sputtered, and swallowed. "She is right. I ought to be ashamed to be alive. I am ashamed—someone cut me loose from the net, and I kicked him down on my way to the surface. I did not know who it was, or care, so long as I could breathe again. My uncle went down with his boat and his crew, but I—what sort of man am I?"

His aunt looked at him impassively, and at first Fernand was afraid she would say that he was no man at all, but only a boy, of whom nothing better could be expected. Then he was afraid she would say nothing; but finally she spoke. "What sort of man? Not the one who decided to take the boat out this morning, clear though it might have been—for it's a poor fisherman who doesn't know which way the wind is blowing. Still, if my husband had done what you did, he might have had another boat in time, and another crew, and he might have done something for the old mothers and widows of those who were drowned. Instead he went down with his boat, and his troubles are over, and ours are just beginning. But you came home to us. You did not let anything stop you. What sort of man are you, Fernand Mondego? The sort I would like to marry my daughter."

In the corner, Mercédès' sobs had quieted, but she still lay with her long, dark hair hiding her face, and showed no sign that she'd heard. Nevertheless Fernand felt, amidst the desolation that the day's events had left of his heart, the first green shoots of hope springing up.

#

_Haidee, whose eyes had been fixed on the door, as if expecting someone, turned hastily, and, seeing the count standing, shrieked, “You do not know me?” said she. “Well, I fortunately recognize you! You are Fernand Mondego, the French officer who led the troops of my noble father! It is you who surrendered the castle of Yanina! It is you who, sent by him to Constantinople, to treat with the emperor for the life or death of your benefactor, brought back a false mandate granting full pardon! It is you who, with that mandate, obtained the pasha's ring, which gave you authority over Selim, the fire-keeper! It is you who stabbed Selim. It is you who sold us, my mother and me, to the merchant, El-Kobbir! Assassin, assassin, assassin, you still have on your brow your master's blood!”_

#

The air still smelled of fire, and gunpowder, and blood, on the shores of a placid lake. A group of Turkish soldiers, splendid in tasseled hats and jackets heavy with braid, and led by an officer in the uniform of the French army, surrounded a woman with striking dark features, who seemed weary unto death, and carried a sleeping girl-child in her arms.

“Why do you look so downcast?” said the French officer. “Have I not saved you from a fiery death?”

His captive gave him a glance from beneath dark eyelashes, but did not raise her head. “Alas! Since my father was killed and I was taken from my family, my own life has meant little enough to me. If it were not for my child here, I would as soon have died with my lord.”

“Did you love him, then?” This was said with a sneer, and yet there was an undertone of genuine curiosity, even wistfulness. “He took you from a gang of petty criminals and made you a queen, he showered you with wealth and jewels—did that erase the harm he did you?”

“Never,” the woman breathed fiercely. “And yet—he was kind to me, and he spared my mother and brothers for my sake—he loved me, in his way. My beauty served them then, and faded as it is, it seems it will serve again.”

There was nothing friendly in the officer's laugh this time. “Indeed, it will serve to fill my pocket. El-Kobbir, the sultan's own procurer, has paid me four hundred thousand francs for you.”

“What?” The woman stopped in her tracks, and the soldiers—who had understood nothing of the conversation, conducted as it had been in French—made to jostle her along with the muzzles of their rifles. The child stirred in her arms. “But you promised me—”

“So? I am the son of a fisherman, and I know which way the wind is blowing. The Sultan would never have pardoned Ali Tepelini, and he will never let me leave his lands alive with Ali Tepelini's favorite wife. And you—you are the daughter of a counterfeiter, and you ought to know the value of my promises. Why should I be faithful to you, when I betrayed your master? For your beauty's sake? I have the most beautiful woman in France for a wife, and I have not seen her these long years. But I will return to her, and I will bring gold and glory to lay at her feet.”

“Gold you may bring, but glory you will never have. Coward!” the woman spat. The child she carried came fully awake, dark eyes wide and frightened.

“Mother!” she cried in Greek. “Where are we? What has happened?”

“Oh, my child,” her mother answered in the same language, in tones of mingled despair and ferocity. “You were free, you had a beloved father, you were destined to be almost a queen. Look well at that man; it is he who raised your father's head on the point of a spear; it is he who sold us; it is he who forsook us! Look well at his right hand, on which he has a large wound, if you forgot his features, you would know him by that hand, into which fell, one by one, the gold pieces of the merchant El-Kobbir!”

The officer turned away without a word. Perhaps the child would live, or perhaps not; perhaps she would remember, or perhaps she would forget; but he did not think he had anything to fear from a girl smaller than his own son had been when he'd left France. The boy would be almost a man now, and the officer resolved to buy him a horse when he returned home, the finest he could. His son would be a better rider than any son of the aristocracy, and no one would say he had not been born to it.

Beneath smoke-clouded foreign skies, his pocket heavy with a queen's ransom, Fernand smiled to picture his Albert on a swift-footed stallion, laughing as if he could outrace death.

#

_The general drew himself up, clinging to the curtain; he uttered the most dreadful sob which ever escaped from the bosom of a father abandoned at the same time by his wife and son. He soon heard the clatter of the iron step of the hackney-coach, then the coachman's voice, and then the rolling of the heavy vehicle shook the windows. He darted to his bedroom to see once more all he had loved in the world, but the hackney-coach drove on and the head of neither Mercédès nor her son appeared at the window to take a last look at the house or the deserted father and husband. And at the very moment when the wheels of that coach crossed the gateway a report was heard, and a thick smoke escaped through one of the panes of the window, which was broken by the explosion._

#

Among a tangle of small islands, far from any major port, a small fishing boat with just a man and a boy for crew rode the clear blue waves of the Mediterranean.  
The man stood holding a spyglass looking out over the water at a yacht with gleaming white sails. He could just make out the figures of a pale man and a dark young girl standing at the rail: the pair who had worked his destruction. The pale man had his arm around the girl's waist, and she rose up on her toes to say something against his ear—the only thing the man in the fishing boat could hear was the rise and fall of waves, and the cries of seabirds, but he recalled a laugh, rich and unrestrained, that he had last heard at a wedding feast many years ago.  
For a moment fear fought with hatred in his bosom, but he was no longer the ardent-hearted wedding guest he had been. The moment passed, and he shrugged. "They have had their vengeance; now let them have their happiness," he said to himself. "So long as they have it far away."

An observer who had a keen eye for faces and a rare ability to separate them from the details of clothing and circumstance—or else one who remembered a certain dramatic revelation, in the House of Peers, about a French officer with a mangled hand—might have recognized the Count of Morcerf. But the Count of Morcerf was dead, had blown his brains out all over his bedroom; Dr. Fournier, who had known the count in the army, had certified it.

There is always a danger, of course, in involving accomplices in one's criminal enterprises, but the count knew enough about Dr. Fournier's activities in Spain during the war—and had left him a small but not insubstantial bequest besides—that the doctor would be in no hurry to see him resurrected. And he had been able to provide not only a death certificate, but also a body—and Dantès would not have stopped his pursuit for anything less than a body.

At bottom, Fernand Mondego was a coward. He had been forced to admit it to himself when, standing in the wreckage of his fortune and his reputation, watching his wife and son leave him, he had held a pistol to his head, closed his eyes, and discharged it, hands trembling, into the window-frame.

The Count of Morcerf could not endure his dishonor, the loss of his position and his family, the knowledge, ultimately, of his own guilt. But Fernand Mondego could endure anything, as long as he could get his next breath. And there is a sort of cowardice that can cling to life amid storm and shipwreck and gunfire, intrigue and betrayal, disgrace and despair, that at times looks more courageous than courage is.

"Sir," called the boy—he was only a wharf rat Fernand had picked up, because he needed crew of some sort, but he had quick hands and a willing heart and dreams, perhaps of bigger things—"sir, the net!"

Fernand lowered his glass and hurried to the stern to help the boy raise the net, hand over hand into the boat, and it was full, a writhing mass of scales and thrashing tails and glassy eyes. This was his treasure now, and he found himself content with it; it meant he would live another day. "Let us return to Marseilles, then," he said.

In Marseilles, there was a woman, of middle years but still heart-breakingly beautiful, who sat by her window watching the sea—though not for Fernand. Someday Fernand would go to that house, throw himself at her feet and beg her forgiveness. For now, he would let her mourn, both for the husband she had turned her back on, and for the lover who had sailed beyond her reach forever. And he would wait, and hope.

**Author's Note:**

> The bits in italics are quotes from the book; I didn't think this story would be complete without them.
> 
> I've taken some details of Vasiliki's life from Dumas' life of Ali Pasha; whether or not they're strictly historically accurate, I feel comfortable considering them Count of Monte Cristo canon.


End file.
